A Senate panel may be stealthily trying to give federal law enforcement a new tool to go after the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks and its U.S. collaborators.

A one-sentence “Sense of Congress” clause was tacked onto the end of a massive 11,700-word bill that was approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee and is likely to come before the full Senate later this month.

The clause says that WikiLeaks “resembles a non-state hostile intelligence service” and that the U.S. government “should treat it as such.”

And this language would help investigators secure the authorization needed to surveil those U.S. citizens thought to be associated with WikiLeaks, said Robert L. Deitz, a lawyer who has held senior legal posts at the CIA, the National Security Agency and at the Pentagon’s intelligence offices. Requests to spy on citizens go to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and, at least theoretically, they are difficult to obtain.

“You need to show that someone is an agent of a foreign power,” said Deitz, who teaches at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia.

In his first public remarks since becoming CIA director, Mike Pompeo called WikiLeaks a ”non-state hostile intelligence service.”

AP

IT’S POSSIBLE THAT ASSANGE HAS COLLEAGUES IN THIS COUNTRY THAT THEY NEED TO FOCUS ON.

Robert L. Deitz, former CIA senior councillor

“It’s possible that Assange has colleagues in this country that they need to focus on,” Deitz said, noting that such action can only be done under court order.

Some mystery surrounds how the clause was added to the Intelligence Authorization Act 2018, the motivations for its inclusion and its intended impact. The office of Sen. Richard Burr, the North Carolina Republican who chairs the intelligence committee, declined to offer details.

But the language in the bill tracks closely with remarks by CIA Director Mike Pompeo April 13 in his first public speech after taking the job.

Speaking at a Washington think tank, Pompeo said: WikiLeaks “walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service. It has encouraged its followers to find jobs at CIA in order to obtain intelligence. … It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is – a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.”

WikiLeaks, which espouses what it calls radical transparency, has been a thorn in the side of the U.S. government for nearly a decade. Earlier this year, it began publishing what it called the biggest ever leak of confidential CIA documents.

The group played an outsized role in the 2016 presidential campaign. In July, the group released thousands of emails obtained after a hack of the Democratic National Committee. In the weeks before the Nov. 8 election, it divulged thousands more emails hacked from the account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, embarrassing her campaign.

According to press reports, a grand jury in the eastern district of Virginia began weighing evidence against Assange and his organization at least four years ago and produced a sealed indictment. The Justice Department has never confirmed those reports. Assange has said he fears extradition to stand trial in the United States on espionage charges based on earlier leaks, including of classified internal military logs of the war in Afghanistan in 2010, and secret State Department cables later that year.

Assange’s U.S. lawyer, Barry Pollack, said he does not believe the secret FISA court should accept the “sense of Congress” clause in any legal argument presented by federal authorities seeking surveillance authority on a U.S. citizen.

“Will some intelligent(cq) agent make that argument to a court and will a court accept that argument? The honest answer is, who knows?” Pollack said.

Pollack, who represents Assange, but not WikiLeaks, said he believes the group does not have paid employees in the United States.

Divisions cleave sectors of the Republican party regarding WikiLeaks. One Republican congressman, Dana Rohrabacher, said he spent three hours with Assange in his embassy refuge in London on Aug. 17, and suggested that President Donald Trump should pardon him.

Trump has not spoken publicly about WikiLeaks since the CIA director declared it to be a hostile entity. He has repeatedly criticized leakers inside his administration and called on the Justice Department to launch probes to stop the unauthorized release of information. But in the heat of the presidential campaign, amid WikiLeaks publication of Podesta’s emails, Trump told an Oct. 10, 2016, rally in Pennsylvania, “I love WikiLeaks.”

As the Senate takes aim at WikiLeaks, dissenting senators voiced worry that the clause inserted in the intelligence authorization act could ricochet and harm traditional journalists.

Sen. Kamala Harris of California declared that she is “no supporter of WikiLeaks,” which she said had done “considerable harm” to the United States. But the clause on the group is “dangerous” because it “fails to draw a bright line between WikiLeaks and legitimate news organizations that play a vital role in our democracy,” according to her remarks for the record.

Another, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, condemned WikiLeaks’ publications of U.S. classified information but said the clause could chill the actions of investigative reporters inquiring about secrets.

“My concern is that the use of the novel phrase ‘non-state hostile intelligence service’ may have legal, constitutional, and policy implications, particularly should it be applied to journalists inquiring about secrets,” Wyden said in his remarks.

Indeed, experts on U.S. intelligence actions said the Senate bill’s phrasing on WikiLeaks is both novel and vague, leaving uncertainty about what may ensue.

Steven Aftergood, a senior research analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, said in a blog post Monday that U.S. agencies, faced with a conventional hostile intelligence agency, might “seek to infiltrate the hostile service, to subvert its agenda, and even to take it over or disable it.”

“Whether such a response would also be elicited by ‘a non-state hostile intelligence service’ is hard to say since the concept itself is new and undefined,” Aftergood wrote.

Julian Assange greets supporters outside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Friday May 19, 2017. Assange fears that if he leaves the embassy, British authorities will extradite him to stand trial in the United States. Frank AugsteinAP

Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.

The Goals of Communism

(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)

1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.

2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.

3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.

4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.

5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.

6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.

7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.

8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.

9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.

10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.

11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)

12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.

13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.

14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.

15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.

16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.

17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.

18. Gain control of all student newspapers.

19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.

20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.

21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.

22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."

27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."

28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."

29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.

30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."

31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.

32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.

33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.

34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.

36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.

37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.

38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.

39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.

40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.

41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.

42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.

43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.

44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.

45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.